So, I've mentioned the bet Garrett Lisi (aka mauitian) made with my colleague Sean and I, at Burning Man 2006 a few times in this blog. But I just got around to digging up the actual video of it, and uploading it to YouTube. In the video, Sean says he's 80% confident that we'll find SUSY at LHC (although when I recently asked him, he said he didn't remember saying a number that high, so perhaps that's not what he meant), while I state that I'm about 50% confident. This was over a year ago, and I'd say my confidence has increased slightly since then, to about 55%. But it could still go either way. Proof that physics is every bit as dramatic and suspenseful as the latest soap opera!...

Fox News has now jumped on the hype train, running a story called Laid-Back Surfer Dude May Be Next Einstein. No offense to him, but I'm going to file this one away with the rest of Fox News' "no spin" storys. Exaggerate much? (Among other things, they use the word "Grand Unified Theory" to mean something completely different than it means.)

Stephen Hawking so far has made 3 public bets, and lost every single one of them. Does this mean the best way to predict what's going to happen is to take all of his statements and negate them? (And then double your confidence if he makes a bet on it?) :) Hehe... I hope I end up with a better track record.

Comments

Hmmm. I was going to ask you what you thought about all that hubub. I did see that Finkelstein thinks there's at least some chance that the guy's right, enough to say something positive about his idea.

The reactions it has received have been almost completely divided along party lines (string and non-string camps). The stringy people (which compose most of the theoretical particle physics community) have completely ignored it, whereas the loopy people (mostly composed of people from a traditional GR background who have started thinking about how to quantize gravity without worrying about particle physics too much) have cheered him on as a hero.

Finkelstein is in the loopy camp. (I'm not using "loopy" in a derrogatory way; the conferences the loopy people hold each year are called Loops '0X while the stringy people hold Strings '0X).

I probably have a lot more to say about the perspective I have on Finkelstein now, but I'd rather say them over the phone if you remind me next time we talk.